Pete Cornia interview (transcript)

Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 1
RANCH FAMILY DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Pete Cornia
Place of Interview: Rich County, Utah
Date of Interview: December 8, 2011
Interviewer: Bob Parson
Recordist: Bob Parson
Recording Equipment: Marantz digital recorder: Model no.: PMD660;
Shure omnidirectional microphone: Model no.: MX 183
Transcription Equipment: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems with foot pedal
Transcribed by: Susan Gross
Transcript Proofed by: Randy Williams, 26 March 2012; Pete Cornia, 11 April 2012
Brief Description of Contents: Mr. Pete Cornia talks about his family history, and his experience growing up on a ranch, and then operating a ranch as an adult. He discusses his views on ranching, education, farming, as well as various other topics.
Reference: BP = Bob Parson (Interviewer)
PC = Pete Cornia (Interviewee)
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “uh” and starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcribed. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets.
TAPE TRANSCRIPTION
[Tape 1: side A: 00:01]
BP: Rich County, Utah. So Pete, tell us a little bit about how you got into the ranching and cattle business. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 2
PC: Well I had worked with my dad growing up all my life, and enjoyed it.
BP: What was your father’s name?
PC: William D. Cornia. He and my mom ran a small place, and she nursed. And after I graduated from Utah State, I came back and was working here, and I was rodeoing on the side. So I was helping dad and my brother, and we leased a place and ran with ours, and we leased my uncle’s place. And I just ended up staying here and helping dad, until he got old enough that I was doing more and more. He died at 72, so we’ve been – that’s been 23 years ago.
BP: Um-hmm?
PC: So my brother and I ran it since then; he works for the ASCS, so primarily I do it.
BP: What’s your brother’s name?
PC: Bill.
BP: Bill?
PC: Cornia. So I’ve had, you know, most of the day-to-day stuff for quite a few years. And the last year or two we’ve started doing a little bit of custom haying, and we still lease my uncle’s place. So we run about 1,100 acres, and around 450 head of mother cows. We buy some grass cattle in the spring, and spay some heifers, and sell a couple loads of them, and then breed the rest. We’ve just been kind of adding things.
BP: Yeah?
PC: So it’s pretty [big] it’s not a huge operation, by any means, but it’s not a small one.
BP: So 1,100 acres – is that deeded property?
PC: Yes, sir.
BP: And most of that under pivots irrigation?
PC: No.
BP: No?
PC: Most of its flood; we have 50 acres under wheel lines –
BP: But it is all irrigated – 1,100 acres?
PC: Not all of it; some of it is river-bottom pasture. We probably hay 750 acres of that.
BP: Do you put out those big, round bales? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 3
[02:04]
PC: No, we use the three by threes.
BP: Yeah?
PC: We use the three by threes; we used to use the bread loaves, and then they finally – they just wore out, they weren’t making them any more.
BP: Explain a little bit about them, because they’re kind of unique – I mean, there’s a lot of them around, but they’re unique to this part of the state.
PC: Yeah, they are.
BP: Yeah.
PC: This is one of the few areas that they lasted very long. You actually pick the hay up in a spout (it blew up a spout), and it weaved, criss-crossed, and weaved hay from front to back, and then you opened the back door –
BP: Of the wagons?
PC: Of the wagon, and then chains would crawl the stack out as you pulled ahead, and then you’d move it with a wagon. And that’s how it was fed; they had a feeder that went with a tooth. The big downer to them was if you got a big windstorm, you might pick all your hay up off the fence. [Laughs]
BP: Even when it was in the loaf?
PC: Oh, yeah; that’s why they didn’t go big in other parts of the country. That, and the fact that you could only sell hay in your area; you couldn’t throw one of those on a semi and haul it to Arizona or Texas.
BP: There was nothing tying it together?
PC: Nothing. It just was weaved together as it picked up loose hay; most of the time they were pretty good, but sometimes they wouldn’t stand very well. But if you got a big wind, you had problems.
BP: And so did you fork that out with a front-end loader, or did you just?
PC: It depended; you could feed them that way. A lot of guys had a [feeder] that was like a swather knife: it came down from the top, it cut it off – you could cut off about that deep, and they’d fall on a conveyor, and then it shot it outside. It was a pretty good way to feed, except it was pretty complex, had a lot of moving parts; they weren’t cheap to run, those feeders.
My dad and I, when he was alive, I used to crawl up on them and pitch: just pitch from the top down. I was on there feeding one day in the middle of February, and I thought, Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 4
“How did my dog get up here on this stack?”: because I saw something black and white move. I took another look, and there were four or five skunks [that] had been hibernating in that [stack]; I couldn’t get off there fast enough!
[04:25]
BP: [Laughing] Did they get you?
PC: No, here they are – they finally jump off, and here they are waddling out through the snow: black and white little buggars (the only black and white thing in that field except for a cow).
BP: [Laughing] Except for your dog.
PC: [Laughs] Except for the dog. But yeah, there were four or five in that stack.
BP: [Laughing] That’s another disadvantage to them.
PC: [Laughs] Yeah!
BP: Those skunks – they’ll get into any place though, that’s a little bit warm, you know.
PC: Oh, yeah; no, I thought, “What in the world? How did that dog get up here?”
BP: So the place you’re running now – that was your father’s place and your --?
PC: Uncle’s.
BP: And what was Kennedy’s name?
PC: Sheldon.
BP: Sheldon.
PC: Sheldon Kennedy. When my mom and dad came back from the war, Sheldon and his brother, Wayne, were running their place. Their dad died when they were fairly young (I think my mom was 16), so Sheldon wouldn’t have been – I don’t think even that old, he was a little younger. But they took the place after the war, and they were in a little bit of a financial bind, and Wayne was sick, so they sold 200 acres of it to my dad and mom. And then they bought another place down below, north of where we were.
BP: Oh, so that’s how your mom and dad got into it?
PC: Um-hmm, yep.
BP: Bought that little bit from Sheldon and Wayne?
PC: Yep, yep; Sheldon and Wayne. And so it’s kind of fitting now, it’s back almost you know; it’s being run as one place again. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 5
BP: Yeah?
PC: With some more attached to it.
BP: But they were – both those ranches were –
PC: Yeah, they’re contiguous.
BP: Contiguous?
PC: Yeah, they are.
[06:11]
BP: So is all your operation on deeded property, or you got some –
PC: No, we have some—
BP: BLM or Forest land?
PC: We have some BLM range.
BP: Do you?
PC: Yeah. And its checkerboard private with the cattle company that runs out here on the Cumberland. It’s 52% -- either 52% private and 48 federal, or vice versa (those are the percentages). And the government checkerboards everything, and that way they control everything. And we own some out in there (we’re part of that cattle company), so we own not a huge part, but some of it.
BP: Do you own any of the private land in there?
PC: Yeah, yeah.
BP: You own some private land, and you own –
PC: Yeah, the company owns it, and we own stock in the company.
BP: In the company?
PC: That’s how they work it.
BP: Okay.
PC: There are a few guys that homesteaded out there, and they took exchange of use with theirs, but I believe they still hold the title to those (some of them do). I think Wally Shulthess still probably has his, but most the rest of them just sold them to the company, and then took stock in the company. So that’s how that works. And my dad had my grandpa’s permit up to Woodruff, and it had some BLM, and also some Forest. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 6
BP: That’s the other way?
PC: That’s the other way, that’s south of us. But he sold it when – oh, I don’t know – I was probably 23-4 years old when he sold that. So we don’t have anything other than – the rest of it we have – we’ve been running about 25, maybe 30 years on a big piece of private ground south of Evanston, that’s been really good range for us, but we just lease it (just sub it from a guy). There’s three of us up there now, it’s been a good deal for us – but you never know when you lease.
BP: If you’re going to have it next year?
PC: [Laughing] If you’ll have it for ten years, or ten minutes.
BP: Can you do a long-term lease, or as long as you can? Or do you just go year to year with them?
PC: Well, they’re pretty much year to year.
BP: Yeah?
PC: We would like to go longer, but they don’t want to. But it’s worked that way for a long time.
BP: Yeah?
PC: It’s been through three owners.
BP: Oh, has it?
[08:33]
PC: Yeah, it’s currently owned by a couple of ladies from China.
BP: China? Hmm.
PC: Yeah. I’m not sure that they don’t live on mainland China now; at one point they lived in Hong Kong, on the island. But I think since the Chinese took over the island, I was told this fall that they’re in mainland China now.
BP: Hmm. So do you see a lot of that? I mean, do you know enough about the people that own the land around here to see what foreign investors are here?
PC: No, but that’s a huge piece of ground.
BP: Yeah?
PC: Most of what’s around here is broken up to a point where it wouldn’t hold any interest; but that’s right [it’s] about 100 square miles. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 7
BP: And you guys lease that whole thing?
PC: Yeah. It runs – between us, and the other two guys – we run about 1,200 head of cows on it – 1,250, something like that, in the summer (from the first part of June until mid-October).
BP: Do you – on private leases – do you determine when it’s the right time to put them on, and taken them off, right?
PC: Yeah. Well, one of the guys that runs with us, he pretty well makes that call.
BP: Yeah.
PC: He’s got cattle, and he manages the range for his right to run on it. So yeah, he watches it; they live just a few miles below it, so he’s in charge of when we go on, and stuff.
BP: Do you have water and everything on a piece that big?
PC: Oh, yeah; it’s a nice piece of ground. It’s you know, a lot of the country is subbed – it’s all hillside and stuff; I guess you’d call it the lower part of the Uintas; it’s not very steep.
[10:35]
BP: Um-hmm.
PC: But not too far south of it, it gets steep (up towards Humpy). There’s some mountains and stuff, but it’s not tough, tough country, until you get south of where we run. But it’s a nice piece of ground.
BP: Yeah, it sounds like it. So your operation is getting pretty good sized?
PC: Yeah, it’s about all a guy and a half can get around.
BP: Are you the guy and a half?
PC: Well, my brother’s the half, and I’m the –
BP: Your brother’s the half?
PC: [Laughing] And I’m the guy, yeah. Because, like I said, he works full time off the place.
BP: Have you got family, yourself?
PC: Yeah, I’ve got a wife and three boys, and a girl.
BP: What’s your wife’s name?
PC: Pam. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 8
BP: Pam – and is she a local gal, here?
PC: No, she came from Morgan.
BP: Morgan. Did she do any ranching over there?
PC: Her dad had a small place.
BP: Yeah?
PC: They were big into horse racing.
BP: Uh-huh?
PC: Her brother jockeyed out in California until he was 54-55 years old, and then he retired. He was AQHA [American Quarter Horse Association] Jockey of the Year two or three times.
BP: Really? [What’s his name?]
PC: [John Creager.] He’s upper echelon for a jockey. And now he’s managing [for] the guy that owns Los Alamitos (the track).
BP: Yeah?
PC: He’s managing his horse ranch for him, up in Atascadero. So that’s her roots: [horse racing].
BP: Yeah; do you have horses up here you do that with?
PC: No.
BP: No?
PC: Most of ours aren’t that fast.
BP: [Laughs]
PC: Pam would love to get a race horse, but we never have.
BP: Do you use – I imagine you have to use your horses?
PC: Oh, yeah; yeah, we don’t do a lot of – we’re not four-wheeler cowboys anymore.
[12:38]
BP: Yeah. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 9
PC: My dad got crippled up, and he bought a four-wheeler – and that’s as close as we’ve been. When his wore out, we just kind of quit that.
BP: Yeah.
PC: I decided I could either have a well-trained four-wheeler, or a pretty good horse.
[Laughter]
BP: Well the horse is probably a better deal, particularly in the country you’ve got to work in.
PC: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of four-wheelers; they talk about how bad a horse can hurt you, but four-wheelers are every bit as bad, or worse.
BP: Yep; so most of where you’re located, you don’t have to do a lot of trucking your animals around, do you?
PC: Yeah, we do.
BP: Do you?
PC: Yeah; we’re 60 miles from our summer range. Except for this side (the east side) – we turn them out the gate. But yeah, I was looking at the bill for trucking too and from, just the other night; I think it was right around $9,000.
BP: Do you have rigs big enough that you can do that? Or do you have to hire somebody?
PC: No, we have to hire; we’ve got a friend that hauls them for us. I think we brought 14 loads out this fall, and probably took 12 up (you can get a few more [on] in the spring, because the calves are smaller).
BP: Yeah.
PC: But it was around 9,000 – just over $9,000 for trucking.
BP: So if you could get all your land –
PC: Oh, yeah; that’s huge.
BP: You’d be –
PC: You might see the day that the only guys that will own a cow are the ones that are contiguous to their range [if] trucking gets too high.
BP: Yeah, well you know, in Cache Valley that’s pretty much put a damper on a lot of those guys that used to run sheep (particularly), and then they take them to the west desert in the winter.
PC: Yeah. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 10
BP: And you know, they can’t afford to truck them that far, if you can find a rig.
PC: Well one year when we had a drought here, and hay was an ungodly price we checked out going back and putting our cattle on some corn fields (back in Nebraska). And the trucking was as much as the feed. I mean – you truck them out there and get a big storm, and have to buy them hay – you’re worse off. And you knew you were in them two trips, no matter whether you stayed a week –
BP: [Laughing]
PC: Or six months. So yeah – I mean that’s what happened there; we didn’t go, and that was why.
BP: Yeah, so you had to? Could you raise most of your feed?
PC: Yeah, but that’s part of the reason we started doing a little custom haying – most guys like to do it for half.
BP: Yeah?
PC: So we pick up feed that way. Not all of them, some people like to pay you for it, because they need the hay. But most guys just say, “Oh, you put it up for half,” so that gets us some extra hay. If we didn’t do that, we’d have to buy hay.
BP: Some years that’s not a bad prospect; right now hay is probably pretty high, isn’t it?
PC: Yeah; yeah, they’re telling me $150 a ton for grass hay. Cattle are high, but you know, that knocks a pretty good hole in it!
BP: It sure does.
PC: [Laughs] That takes the profit out of it –
BP: Yeah.
PC: When you’ve got to buy hay for that much.
BP: Yeah; if you could get hay for $40 a ton, and have cattle high that would be –
PC: I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see that.
BP: [Laughing] I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen.
PC: I think god doesn’t think cowboys are emotionally or intellectually mature enough to handle being rich.
BP: No? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 11
PC: Because when prices are good he sends in a horrendous spring, and half the damn calves die; and so you just – because they’re high, you make enough to keep going. And when the price is low he sends you nice weather, and it keeps you going again.
[16:44]
BP: Did you have a tough calving spring this year?
PC: Yeah. Yeah, we did; it was rough.
BP: Wet, mud?
PC: Wet, and cold. It actually snowed hard twice on Memorial weekend (two different days on Memorial weekend).
BP: Oh, man.
PC: I’m talking wet, heavy snow – not just a duster going through.
BP: I can’t remember if we got that down in Logan; of course we had the same kind of a spring, but I don’t remember that we actually got snow in the valley. It snowed in the mountains right up to the middle of June!
PC: Yeah. Friday night it rained and turned to snow; hell, it snowed so hard. And then again, I believe Saturday night or Sunday night it snowed again [laughs].
BP: Right in the middle of –
PC: Right in the middle of Memorial weekend. And you know, we didn’t ship our cows to the range until – I think the last one left on the tenth of June. You were asking earlier who determines when it was time to go – there just was no grass, it hadn’t melted, and it was cold. So we sat on – normally we’ll start moving cattle the 25th of May – so that was an easy two weeks later.
BP: So that’s another two weeks’ worth of hay.
PC: Yeah. And then the bad thing is your cattle are so congregated on the feed row – it’s like sending kids to the daycare: one of them gets a snotty nose, they’ve all got it? Same deal with calves on a feed row. If you can get them spread out, you’ve got a chance to keep them alive; if they’re eating on top of each other it just goes – whatever happens, happens. So yeah – it was a hard spring.
BP: It was a strange year.
PC: Yeah, it was.
[18:40] Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 12
BP: The whole year was kind of strange. So you’ve got – in your haying operation, do you got a big swather, and a baler?
PC: Well, we use a pull-behind. If I ever go broke it won’t be because of fancy machinery.
BP: Yeah.
PC: I was talking to Nick Wamsley from over in the valley today, because we’re looking at trying to get a smaller tractor to feed with (we feed with a big 160-horse John Deere, and we don’t need that much tractor). He asked me how many hours were on the one we were wanting to trade, and I said, “Well in 800 more hours it will be brand new.”
[Laughing]
He laughed, he said, “I guess that means it’s got 9,100 and something hours on it, huh?”
[Laughing]
I said, “Yeah, you’re pretty good, Nick.”
BP: The hour gauge is still on it?
PC: [Laughing] Yeah. Oh yeah, it’s still turning.
[Laughter]
BP: Well, that’s a big expense.
PC: Yeah, it is.
BP: If you’re going to be buying those tractors. I mean, it’s pretty hard – you’ve got to sell a lot of calves to pay for a tractor, or swather, or anything else.
PC: Personally, there’s guys that buy those big, self-propelled [swathers]; but I can’t make it pencil out for me. You can buy a header for 25,000, and one of those is 80 or 100; so you’re parking three-quarters of what you’re paying for, nine or 10 months, 11 months out of the year – depending on how big of an operation you’ve got haying. I mean some guys hay for six weeks here. If you park something that long, I don’t know how you get your money out of them. But some guys like them. But we’ve always just had a pull-behind, and you can drop it and use your tractor.
BP: That makes more sense to me.
PC: Well, it does to me; but they’ve probably got an angle on it I’m not seeing.
BP: [Laughing]
[20:45] Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 13
PC: And then we’ve got a three by three baler. So it’s not the biggest one (by far), but it works pretty good for us.
BP: It puts a lot of hay into a bale?
PC: Oh yeah.
BP: 1,000 pounds?
PC: Oh, alfalfa will go 8[00] – you know, 800-850, something like that; the grass, usually around 700. I made a little feeder here a couple years ago that turned out pretty nice. I used – you were asking about the bread loaves – I used one of those wagons and took the feeder part off of it, and hooked a hydraulic motor up to the conveyor so it turned slow. And then I just hit it with a little bar at the end (a little wedge), and it crimps the bale just a little bit, and crawls along and tips over.
BP: So it’s to feed them in the winter?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Sounds like you ought to get that –
PC: Patented?
BP: Patented.
PC: Nick came over and looked at it, and he said, “You know, when I come over here,” he said, “I wasn’t expecting much. But,” he said, “this is pretty slick.”
I said, “Well, the biggest trouble is, Nick, anybody that can weld, and run a torch can build their own – they don’t need [laughing] – they don’t need to buy it through me!”
BP: Well, you’d have to have one of those –
PC: Because it’s really simple.
BP: You’d have to have one of those things though.
PC: Yeah.
BP: To get it to –
PC: Yeah, you’d have to have one of the wagons. And I’ve seen other feeders that are made to fit on that wagon.
BP: Yeah?
PC: One of the guys here has got one. But this one, I think, is every bit as good, and it was a lot cheaper, because I built it [laughs]. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 14
BP: Yeah.
PC: I work cheap!
BP: [Laughs] Yeah. You can afford to pay yourself.
PC: [Laughing] Yeah, I haven’t made $90 an hour in my life!
[Laughter]
I made 50 once, throwing three-wire bales around (when I was younger).
BP: Fifty dollars and hour?
PC: Yeah, I went to work for –
BP: You weren’t throwing three-wire bales very far.
[22:44]
PC: I was unloading hay trucks for a guy; they had a big drought in here, and we bought some hay. And he asked my dad, “Do you know anybody who wants to make a little money unloading bales?”
“Yeah, my kid will.” And it turned into about a three or four year job for me in the fall.
BP: Really?
PC: But he would pay me $30 a load, and you could unload five loads in a day, if you hit it hard, set of doubles. If you had a [good] guy with you, it goes pretty good.
BP: Do they have like boards on the end of those?
PC: Huh?
BP: Did they have the boards, and the wires that went over boards?
PC: No.
BP: No, they just had –
PC: They were just –
BP: Wire tied?
PC: Yeah, they were just wire-tied. They’d weigh 100-120 pounds; they were big bales.
BP: You don’t see them anymore, do you? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 15
PC: No, nobody wants to work that hard.
BP: I think that’s part of it.
PC: They were heavy. We got in a load of third-crop out in Wells one day, and the hay was so soft you couldn’t keep a bale hook in them. I could pick it up about that far –
BP: Did it have wires?
PC: And the guy that was helping me – he could pick up one end and drag them – that’s all he could do [laughs]. He couldn’t even daylight them.
BP: That’s a poor baling job, wouldn’t it?
PC: Well, there’s just no stem to them, you know, that third crop is just straight leaves. You stick a bale hook in them, and out they would come.
BP: Well you earned your money.
PC: Yeah, we did.
BP: Getting that load undone.
PC: I guess it wasn’t $90 an hour, but it seemed like a lot of money in those days – $150 a day. That was back around ’78-9.
BP: You were doing okay.
PC: Somewhere in there.
BP: Luckily you were young.
PC: Yeah.
BP: I don’t know if your back could do it now, would it?
PC: It wouldn’t; I went to college broke one year, and I decided I was never going to do that again.
[24:50]
BP: [Laughing]
PC: So every year after that I would get a job in the fall, and then I would go to school winter and spring. The last year I finally thought, “I can’t drag this out anymore.” So I took out a loan for the last quarter and got done.
BP: What did you do – what kind of a – what were your classes? Animal science or something like that? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 16
PC: I took a little of that, not much; mainly economics – I [have] an Ag Business degree –
BP: Oh, do you?
PC: Is what [I have].
BP: When did you graduate up there?
PC: Eighty.
BP: Eighty? When did you start up there?
PC: Seventy-four [laughs].
BP: The six year program.
PC: I actually only went to school ten quarters –
BP: Yeah.
PC: To graduate; so I got out early, but it took me awhile to get there, because I was paying for it. I had a scholarship when I started, and when I come back I didn’t get that picked up again. After that it was all my money.
BP: But you made it through school taking a loan out for one quarter?
PC: Yeah, yeah.
BP: Nineteen eighty –
PC: Yep, I borrowed $1500.
BP: You did alright.
PC: Yeah. I remember one year I was broke a buddy and I – we’d take turns buying a six-pack of beer, and we’d go up the canyon and shoot squirrels. That was all we could afford to do for fun [laughing].
BP: Doesn’t sound like a bad afternoon [laughs].
PC: No, it’s a good afternoon until you try to pick up a girl with that strategy, and that didn’t get you very far.
BP: [Laughing] Where did you and your wife meet up there?
PC: No.
BP: No? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 17
PC: Uh-uh. No, I met her after I got out of school.
BP: So you didn’t take her on a squirrel shooting date?
PC: No, uh-uh; uh-uh.
BP: [Laughing]
[26:50]
PC: Here’s kind of a funny story about my wife and I. My dad showed me a picture that a guy (here in town) had taken years, and years ago – he was maybe 14 (my dad was). And he’s telling me who these guys in the picture are, and they’re all kids: one of them was his brother, and another one was a brother to the photographer. And then there was this other little guy just sitting there, and I could tell he was younger then those other ones in the picture. And I said, “Now who’s that guy?”
And he said, “Oh, he’s just a little guy that – his name was Bud Creager, he lived just up the street from us for a couple of years.”
Well Pam and I went out, and the next week her dad brings this picture out and starts to show me, and I thought, “I’ve seen that picture!” And it was Bud, the little guy that dad said, “Oh, he just moved in,” it was my wife’s dad.
BP: So he actually lived up here?
PC: He lived in Woodruff for a couple of years, and he was in that photograph of dad’s –
BP: Did your wife know that?
PC: Not until –
BP: Not until then?
PC: No, uh-uh. I mean, she knew he lived there, you know, but she didn’t know about the picture until Bud showed me.
BP: I know a lot of people tried their hand at living out here.
PC: Yeah.
BP: And didn’t make it very many years.
PC: No.
BP: Or even weeks.
PC: They lived in Bridger Valley too, for awhile. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 18
BP: Wow, that’s –
PC: And then they came to Woodruff, and then I think Johnny moved them back down there in Morgan. I don’t know whether he had family there or not.
BP: Yeah.
PC: Yep, Bud wouldn’t have been more than maybe nine or ten. And there he was, big as life in that picture.
[Laughing]
BP: That’s funny.
PC: I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, you know if Pam and I hadn’t ended up getting married; but it was quite a coincidence.
[28:50]
BP: Do you think your kids are going to – you said how many boys you have?
PC: Three.
BP: Do they – are any interested in the ranch?
PC: Well, it’s too little; right now dad needs it. But yeah, I’ve got two that really like cowboying. One of them is here working for a guy (ranching for a guy), and the other one that likes it is in Honduras right now. But I told him, I said, “Son, you need to come back and be a doctor or a lawyer, and buy your dad a ranch, and I’ll run it for you until you’re sick of the city.”
BP: [Laughing]
PC: So we’ve got that all worked out.
BP: Do you?
PC: [Laughs] And the other boy – he’s a mechanic; he likes that stuff, he doesn’t care much for cows and stuff. And my daughter – I don’t know what you – she likes to ride, but she’s not nuts for it, so I don’t know if she’ll want anything to do with it or not.
BP: Now you said you did a little rodeo?
PC: Yeah. Yeah, I rode bareback horses until I was 24.
BP: Until you got smart enough?
PC: Well, I had one flip on me out to the circuit finals in Elko one year, and broke my neck pretty bad. I’ve been 50 since then (been 50 years old since that horse landed). Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 19
BP: I’ll bet.
PC: My boy broke his neck on a bronc horse, and he just walked right away; but there wasn’t [any] walking away for me.
BP: What do you mean he walked away? He didn’t know it was broken?
PC: He didn’t know it was broken.
BP: When did he figure out it was?
PC: Oh, his neck – that was on a Saturday night, and he went with his buddies out in the hills out here, out on that checkerboard range. And he called his mother and said, “My neck is still hurting, maybe you better get me an appointment with the chiropractor.”
So she calls her buddy the chiropractor on Monday morning, and Clint goes in the afternoon, and she gets a call from Dee saying, “This boy’s got a broken neck, you get over here.” He put him in a collar and sent him to the hospital right now. He didn’t get to manipulating him [laughs].
So we’re sitting in the room – there’s five of us in there, and two of us had broken their neck; I said, “What’s the odds of that?” (I asked the nurse that.) But I was –
BP: Probably, if they’re cowboys –
PC: Maybe better than you’d thought.
BP: Yeah, uh-huh.
PC: Yeah. But I laid there in the arena for – oh, I don’t know – 30 minutes because they got the ambulance stuck. And I could move –
[End Tape 1: side A– 31:23]
[Beginning Tape 1: side B: 00:01]
BP: So we were talking about your rodeo days – were you doing that while you were going to college?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Or was it before or after?
PC: Both.
BP: Both?
PC: I rode a little bit in high school, and then I went on a mission. And when I come back I started again, and I finally got it figured out enough to fill my permit in the RCA, and Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 20
that’s where I was when I broke my neck, was at the circuit finals down there. It was quite a [wreck], they got a picture just as he lands, and it hung in Cross Western Wear for 30 years, until they went broke. It still hangs down there in the Spring Creek Horse Palace, where I did it.
But I was halfway back to Elko, and couldn’t get a toe to move. My brother was with me in the ambulance, and I said, you know, “Watch my foot,” nothing. I kept trying and trying, and trying; finally I got my big toe to move, and I thought, “I’ll be alright.”
I get in there, and I’m numb – I mean, I can’t feel a thing (no pain, nothing). And the nurse looks at me, and she said, “We got to take your shirt off, can you stand to have us unbutton it?” And I said, “Yeah, I can’t feel anything, go ahead.”
She undid one snap, and I looked at her, and I said, “You better get the scissors out,” because I came out of it then [laughing]. Oh, man.
BP: And then there wasn’t a part of you that didn’t –
PC: Then it was a long night; then it was an awful long night.
BP: Huh.
PC: They put me on a life flight out of there about four o’clock in the morning; I got up to Salt Lake, I don’t know, about six.
BP: So what’s the process of a broken neck? What do they do?
PC: Well, they put me in traction for ten days and they couldn’t get it to move. The doctor came in, he said, “I’m not sure,” he said, “We’re wondering if this is an old break. Could you have ever broken your neck before?”
And I said, “Well, we were wrestling (my brother and I) once, and I got a pretty good stinger. But,” I said, “I don’t think I broke my neck.”
“Well, we’re going to go in.” Anyway, it was a fresh break, but they fused it and put some wire in it. I was there for 20 days. But you know, it doesn’t bother me, other than I can’t turn my head. I’m the easiest guy to sneak up on in Rich County.
BP: [Laughs]
[02:37]
PC: But I lost a lot of reflexes; it did quite a bit of nerve damage. We had a stray crawl in the next spring (which would have been from November to May, about six months later). My dad went and got her in (she crawled in [with] the bulls), and he got on a horse and went and got her, and she was on the fight. She came in the corral – and that’s pretty good incentive, when one of them is chasing you. [Laughs] I ran over [to] the fence and tried to jump; I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled [with] my hands and jumped. And I didn’t Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 21
make it to the [top of the] bottom two by six (that’s how much athletic ability I had left) [laughing].
BP: What did the stray do?
PC: Well, she just blew on by.
BP: Yeah.
PC: She was bluffing, but I didn’t dare take a chance.
[Laughing]
But my boy, he still rides broncs (he’s 27), and he’s got hurt a bunch. He broke his neck, broke his back, broke his leg. He went to the high school nationals –
BP: Is he still running?
PC: Yeah, he’s still riding.
BP: Or still riding?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Well that stuff sort of gets in your blood.
PC: Oh, yeah.
BP: Like an addiction, doesn’t it?
PC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s a high, just can’t get anywhere else. Crawl off a bareback horse you’d rode right, and man, you’re just walking on air all the way back to the chutes.
BP: There’s not many times you get to crawl off of one.
PC: [Laughing] Not many; not many. I tried to give the pick-up men something to do, but not all the time [laughs].
BP: Yeah, that’s quite a deal.
[04:29]
PC: My youngest kid, he wanted to but he loved football and I kept talking him out of it, and talking him out of it –
BP: Which is more dangerous?
PC: Well, I told him, I said, “You know, Cooper, I was out of school when I broke my neck.” I said, “If I’d have done that when I was in high school, my sports would have been Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 22
over.” So I kind of talked him out of it; he rode some colts, and stuff and he got on a few with his brother down in Ogden. But I don’t know whether he’ll ride when he gets back from Honduras or not; maybe if he doesn’t get married.
BP: Is he on a mission down there or something?
PC: Yeah.
BP: So 27 – that’s getting towards the end of a –
PC: Yeah, some of those guys: bronc riders, saddle bronc riders will last longer than that; some of them make it [to] 35. Billy Etbauer – hell, he was pushing 50 before he quit, riding NFR [National Finals Rodeo] horses; but he’s a rarity. But it’s not as hard on you as barebacks.
[Laughs] About a year ago, about this time of year, I went down and had carpel tunnel surgery on my left hand, and the guy said, “I don’t know what you’ve done to this elbow,” he said, “But it’s not right.”
I said, “Well, that was my riding hand.” [Laughs] I said, “It took some jerkings.”
He said, “Well it’s a good thing you finally come in here,” he said, “You’d have lost the use of your fingers.”
BP: Is that right?
PC: They just pinched nerves in there, I guess, I don’t know. Because you know, I don’t run – like I said (we talked earlier) – I don’t run a computer.
BP: Yeah, there’s only so much that the body can take.
PC: [Laughing] Yeah. But it’s pretty good now. But bronc riding is easier on your body, so some of them last a little longer. But yeah – I don’t know how much longer he’ll ride. He ended up Reserve Champion in the association he was in, for the year – so he’s still riding pretty good.
[06:30]
But they’re running out of cowboys, they really are. Most of the ones that want to rodeo want to rope, you know. We went to Evanston Cowboy Days (which is a really good rodeo), and I think they had eight cowboys entered the bareback riding for Labor Day, and only four of them came, the other four turned out.
BP: Really?
PC: They’re just running out of them; too many kids are raised in the city. I wrote a poem called “The Dying Breed” and that’s about what we are [laughs].
BP: So how did you get interested in this cowboy poetry? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 23
PC: Oh, I wrote one 30 years ago and never thought much about it. And I was home one night when Cooper was little (he was about twelve years old), and my wife was gone. I got bored, and they’d just found the first mad cow in the United States. And I sat down and wrote a poem called “Ballad of the Mad Cow” and they’ve just been coming out ever since [laughs].
BP: Good for you.
PC: I’ve had a lot of fun with it.
BP: Do you ever go around to any of the gatherings?
PC: Oh, I’ve never done anything at them. I do some, you know – last Friday they had a little deal here (Friday and Saturday), and I do some poems for that, and I’ve got some CDs out.
BP: Do you?
PC: I wrote a Christmas poem for my daughter when she was six, and I put that in a book, and I’ve been peddling that around and stuff. It’s been kind of fun.
BP: Have you ever been to the one around the one in Elko?
PC: No; I’ve been going to go, but Cooper was always playing ball that time of year (that’s in January).
BP: Randy – she goes out to it every year, she’s a folklorist, you know.
PC: Oh, yeah.
BP: So she knows all those –
PC: I sent a CD down. I don’t tell everybody this, but my wife and I went to Baxter Black (over in Preston) a year ago, when he came to the Valley Implement. And I gave him a CD after it was over – bought a book, and a CD of his, and I said, “I want to be able to tell my boys I gave you a CD.” [Laughs] So he took it and thanked me.
And – oh, I don’t know – it was a month later he called me. He said, “I liked that stuff on there.” He said would you go to Elko, would you send some stuff down there?” Anyway, I did, but they said they didn’t need me, but it was still fun. That’s as close as I’ve come to going. They said they had 200 poets send stuff in.
[09:19]
BP: I’ve never been out to it.
PC: It’s a huge deal. I’ve been to Heber City.
BP: It’s quite a party, I guess, they say. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 24
PC: Oh, I’m sure. I’ve been to Heber City a couple of times, but I’ve never been out to Elko. You know, it would have been fun to have them say, “Yeah, come on out.” But it was still fun to have Baxter like it – he’s about as good as it gets.
BP: Bottom line though, it’s a way to get what you’re feeling out.
PC: Yeah, my wife tells me it’s therapy [laughs].
BP: I suspect it is.
PC: Yeah, there’s been a time or two I’ve been so frustrated – rather than throw something out the window, I’ve written about it. But it’s fun; most of them are funny, but not all of them.
BP: Kind of like life.
PC: Yeah. I wrote one for a friend of mine – he got killed in a car wreck; he got paralyzed, and then he was so paralyzed that he would have never got off the respiration machine. Anyway, I wrote one and gave it to his wife. And I read it to her, and she’s sitting there, tears start running down her cheeks, and dripping on her boots. If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget that.
BP: That’s good that you touched somebody. Was that a guy locally, here?
PC: He was a vet up in Evanston, Wyoming. He was an organ donor, and that’s what I kind of wrote the story about, what that would mean to somebody else.
BP: Yeah.
PC: He was a good guy. In fact, I think they wrecked two years ago today, and he lived for two or three days on a machine, and said, “No, I can’t do this.” And they unplugged him – he was gone in minutes.
BP: Yeah; did he – he wasn’t in any shape to make that decision, was he?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Oh, really?
[11:32]
PC: I mean he couldn’t talk – all he could do was blink his eyes. That was the sign; I wasn’t there, but that’s what I was told.
BP: Yeah; well, what else do you want to tell me about your ranching stuff?
PC: Oh, it’s a good way of life. I’m on the school board up here, and a friend of mine (he ranches) – I don’t know if I would call him a “cowboy” but I would call him a rancher. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 25
And he asked me one time, he said, “What are these kids going to do that don’t want to go to college, that just want to ranch?”
And I said, “If they don’t have to have a new truck, and a big, fancy house every time they turn around,” I said, “they’ll go to work, and they’ll be happier than most of the guys with lots of money. But,” I said, “If they have got to have a new truck every other year, and their wife wants the biggest house in town – they’ve got a problem.”
So you have to be willing to not have – you can see my truck – the paint job on my truck.
BP: Yeah, I saw that as I pulled up.
PC: [Laughs]
BP: I thought, “There’s a man after my own.”
[Laughing]
PC: If you can’t stand to drive a truck that looks like that, you better find a different job.
BP: Yep.
PC: But you know, not whining – they’re making it hard on things, because they don’t value what technical guys do (like mechanics, and carpenters, and farmers); that’s not where the push is now – we’ve all got to go to college. Well there is a certain niche of our population that have no business going to college, because that’s not where their talents lie.
BP: Let me back up for a minute: what pushed you to college then?
[13:35]
PC: Well, my folks just wanted me to have a degree. They said, “You’ve got to have something you can fall back on.” That’s why I went to college. And you know, all the information was good – I used some of it, business stuff.
BP: What are you telling your own kids?
PC: Well I tried to send them to college.
BP: Yeah?
PC: The first two of them wanted nothing to do with it. The oldest kid (the one that’s cowboying), he liked school – he could’ve made it through college okay. The middle one – he’s a mechanically-oriented kid; and he could have maybe went to diesel mechanics, or something like that, and done himself some good. But he’s picked it up, and that’s what he’s doing now. The youngest boy – he’s pretty smart, he likes that kind of stuff. He had his associate degree when he graduated from high school up here. So he’s on his Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 26
way. But you know you can’t de-value what those people do; they have as much to do with running our society as all the pencil-pushers do.
BP: Yeah.
PC: And we’re losing that.
BP: The crafts –
PC: The crafts – they’ve been de-valued, and that’s wrong.
BP: Yeah.
PC: I told the governor up here – I got invited to a deal, he came by one day; I find myself in situations with the school board sometimes, that I wouldn’t be normally, and he came and stopped at the school, and so we got invited. And I asked him a question about that; I said, “I went to a construction site, and everybody working [there] was ESL.” And he thought I was worried about open borders –
BP: Um-hmm?
PC: I said, “I don’t care about that.” I said, “What bothers me is we’re losing those skills, crafts.” I said, “Who’s going to build my daughter’s house?”
BP: Well, you know there’s a reason why everybody at that construction site was ESL is because they’re the only ones who know how to do the work.
PC: Exactly. And to them, the compensation they’re getting is so much better than they would be getting at home, that it’s still a good wage.
BP: Sure.
[15:50]
PC: But you know Americans don’t want to work that hard for that kind of money. But we’re losing those kinds of skills and crafts.
BP: Yeah, and you know – well, nothing is – if you ever got somebody to keep it moving –
PC: When “No Child Left Behind” was passed [a former superintendent] (he wasn’t superintendent then, but he was when I first came on the board), he made this comment to me. He said, “Not everyone – that’s not their strong point, to go to college (everybody in society).” He said, “There are kids that you hand them a blue-collar job, and they’ll do a tremendous job at it, they’ll make a good living.” He said, “What are they thinking?”
BP: So you mentioned “No Child Left Behind” is intended to prepare people for –
PC: College. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 27
BP: For college.
PC: Yeah.
BP: Well, that’s they way high school is.
PC: Yeah, and I just think they’re missing –
BP: And we’re getting kind of away here, but I don’t care. My son – he made it through high school because we ended up pulling him out of high school and putting in him one of these alternative high schools.
PC: Um-hmm?
BP: But he did make it through that.
PC: Um-hmm.
BP: Because everything the school was geared towards was talk you know, and that was to push people towards –
PC: College.
BP: Towards college, which he never had intention of going.
PC: Yeah. And they’re losing a pretty valuable part of our society by doing that.
BP: I know. He’s a mechanical kind of kid.
PC: Well that’s when my middle –
BP: I wish I had a great, big ranch that I could give him –
PC: Yeah.
BP: He’d be the happiest kid in the world.
[17:54]
PC: That’s the way my middle kid is; he struggled in school, but you hand him a wrench, and you know – you look like you’re probably about my age – they used to test IQs when we were kids.
BP: 40!
PC: Yeah!
[Laughing] Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 28
But I remember on the IQ test I was absolutely terrible on spatial relations; well he’s just a whiz at it, you know. He can turn something – I’ve struggled with that all my life. I mean, I build a lot of stuff (welding, and stuff), so I’ve had to get better at [it]. But I still once in awhile build a part, and it’s exactly backwards from what it needed to be.
BP: [Laughing]
PC: Well, there’s a good section of our population that that’s where their strengths lie, so don’t tell them that’s not of any value.
BP: I don’t even know if they do those things anymore?
PC: I don’t think they do, I think they figured it was “typing” kids.
BP: You’d have to –
PC: Oh, yeah; but they were afraid it was, typing kids, putting them in slots that they’d stay in all their life. And so they quit. But I don’t remember what my IQ was, but I remember I bombed the spacial relations [laughs].
BP: Trying to get all those little boxes –
PC: Yeah.
BP: Different shapes – yeah, I never did do very well with that stuff either.
PC: So that’s, you know, that’s a concern I have. That, and the environmentalists, they don’t –
BP: Do they give you a hard time up here, on your ranch?
PC: Oh, not particularly here; but they’re after the BLM all the time to get the cattle off. I guess they’d sooner have that land produce absolutely nothing, as long as it didn’t, if it just sat there fallow, why it couldn’t get any better than that: we’ll buy our food from China.
BP: What do you suspect drives that agenda? I mean, it’s an agenda that they have – it’s not like they’re going out and they have noticed this over-grazing thing; they just – it’s every allotment.
PC: I know. I honestly don’t know, unless it’s just money. I don’t know why people would have those kinds of thoughts: that it’s better to leave something fallow, than it is to produce. Pretty quick, we’ll buy everything we get from foreign countries.
I wrote a poem called “The North American Free Trade Agreement Cowboy Way.” And that’s what it is – it takes common stuff like a pocket knife, and a pair of Wranglers, and Budweiser beer – I mean, none of that stuff is made in America anymore. And then the last line is he is going riding the next morning on ground that’s not owned by Americans Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 29
anymore. But it will be okay, because that’s the North American Free Trade Agreement cowboy way.
[20:47]
BP: Um-hmm.
PC: And that’s what’s happening to us. If I hear one more law maker talk about cutting the deficit – hell with cutting the deficit – pay the damn debt back. It doesn’t do any good to just go broke, more slowly – that does no good. That’s all they’re after, “Let’s not go broke quite as fast.”
BP: Um-hmm.
PC: But anyway, that’s not really ranching, except how it relates to the economic part of it.
BP: Yeah, doesn’t it.
PC: Yeah.
BP: Well, Pete – it’s been a good conversation.
PC: Yeah, I enjoyed it.
BP: Always nice to meet somebody that, you know –
PC: I hope I can –
BP: Stayed on the –
PC: I hope I can keep it together long enough – I’d like to see my kids have a chance too. But I sure hope I –
BP: It’s getting harder and harder to –
PC: Do.
BP: To afford.
PC: Oh, yeah. One of the major problems now is when you try to buy a piece of ground, you’re not competing against other ranchers, you’re competing against doctors, and lawyers that just want to buy some ground. And the value is way past what agriculture can pay.
BP: Yeah. I mean, you can’t even find an appraiser that will come in and appraise a piece of ground for its agricultural value hardly anymore.
PC: Yeah. That’s why I told my boy, “Go be a doctor or a lawyer for a few years,” and then we’d ranch together [laughs]. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 30
BP: That’s not a bad plan.
Alright, Pete; I’m going to shut this off.
[End Side Tape 1: side B: 22:32]

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Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 1
RANCH FAMILY DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Pete Cornia
Place of Interview: Rich County, Utah
Date of Interview: December 8, 2011
Interviewer: Bob Parson
Recordist: Bob Parson
Recording Equipment: Marantz digital recorder: Model no.: PMD660;
Shure omnidirectional microphone: Model no.: MX 183
Transcription Equipment: Power Player Transcription Software: Executive Communication Systems with foot pedal
Transcribed by: Susan Gross
Transcript Proofed by: Randy Williams, 26 March 2012; Pete Cornia, 11 April 2012
Brief Description of Contents: Mr. Pete Cornia talks about his family history, and his experience growing up on a ranch, and then operating a ranch as an adult. He discusses his views on ranching, education, farming, as well as various other topics.
Reference: BP = Bob Parson (Interviewer)
PC = Pete Cornia (Interviewee)
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as “uh” and starts and stops in conversations are not included in transcribed. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets.
TAPE TRANSCRIPTION
[Tape 1: side A: 00:01]
BP: Rich County, Utah. So Pete, tell us a little bit about how you got into the ranching and cattle business. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 2
PC: Well I had worked with my dad growing up all my life, and enjoyed it.
BP: What was your father’s name?
PC: William D. Cornia. He and my mom ran a small place, and she nursed. And after I graduated from Utah State, I came back and was working here, and I was rodeoing on the side. So I was helping dad and my brother, and we leased a place and ran with ours, and we leased my uncle’s place. And I just ended up staying here and helping dad, until he got old enough that I was doing more and more. He died at 72, so we’ve been – that’s been 23 years ago.
BP: Um-hmm?
PC: So my brother and I ran it since then; he works for the ASCS, so primarily I do it.
BP: What’s your brother’s name?
PC: Bill.
BP: Bill?
PC: Cornia. So I’ve had, you know, most of the day-to-day stuff for quite a few years. And the last year or two we’ve started doing a little bit of custom haying, and we still lease my uncle’s place. So we run about 1,100 acres, and around 450 head of mother cows. We buy some grass cattle in the spring, and spay some heifers, and sell a couple loads of them, and then breed the rest. We’ve just been kind of adding things.
BP: Yeah?
PC: So it’s pretty [big] it’s not a huge operation, by any means, but it’s not a small one.
BP: So 1,100 acres – is that deeded property?
PC: Yes, sir.
BP: And most of that under pivots irrigation?
PC: No.
BP: No?
PC: Most of its flood; we have 50 acres under wheel lines –
BP: But it is all irrigated – 1,100 acres?
PC: Not all of it; some of it is river-bottom pasture. We probably hay 750 acres of that.
BP: Do you put out those big, round bales? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 3
[02:04]
PC: No, we use the three by threes.
BP: Yeah?
PC: We use the three by threes; we used to use the bread loaves, and then they finally – they just wore out, they weren’t making them any more.
BP: Explain a little bit about them, because they’re kind of unique – I mean, there’s a lot of them around, but they’re unique to this part of the state.
PC: Yeah, they are.
BP: Yeah.
PC: This is one of the few areas that they lasted very long. You actually pick the hay up in a spout (it blew up a spout), and it weaved, criss-crossed, and weaved hay from front to back, and then you opened the back door –
BP: Of the wagons?
PC: Of the wagon, and then chains would crawl the stack out as you pulled ahead, and then you’d move it with a wagon. And that’s how it was fed; they had a feeder that went with a tooth. The big downer to them was if you got a big windstorm, you might pick all your hay up off the fence. [Laughs]
BP: Even when it was in the loaf?
PC: Oh, yeah; that’s why they didn’t go big in other parts of the country. That, and the fact that you could only sell hay in your area; you couldn’t throw one of those on a semi and haul it to Arizona or Texas.
BP: There was nothing tying it together?
PC: Nothing. It just was weaved together as it picked up loose hay; most of the time they were pretty good, but sometimes they wouldn’t stand very well. But if you got a big wind, you had problems.
BP: And so did you fork that out with a front-end loader, or did you just?
PC: It depended; you could feed them that way. A lot of guys had a [feeder] that was like a swather knife: it came down from the top, it cut it off – you could cut off about that deep, and they’d fall on a conveyor, and then it shot it outside. It was a pretty good way to feed, except it was pretty complex, had a lot of moving parts; they weren’t cheap to run, those feeders.
My dad and I, when he was alive, I used to crawl up on them and pitch: just pitch from the top down. I was on there feeding one day in the middle of February, and I thought, Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 4
“How did my dog get up here on this stack?”: because I saw something black and white move. I took another look, and there were four or five skunks [that] had been hibernating in that [stack]; I couldn’t get off there fast enough!
[04:25]
BP: [Laughing] Did they get you?
PC: No, here they are – they finally jump off, and here they are waddling out through the snow: black and white little buggars (the only black and white thing in that field except for a cow).
BP: [Laughing] Except for your dog.
PC: [Laughs] Except for the dog. But yeah, there were four or five in that stack.
BP: [Laughing] That’s another disadvantage to them.
PC: [Laughs] Yeah!
BP: Those skunks – they’ll get into any place though, that’s a little bit warm, you know.
PC: Oh, yeah; no, I thought, “What in the world? How did that dog get up here?”
BP: So the place you’re running now – that was your father’s place and your --?
PC: Uncle’s.
BP: And what was Kennedy’s name?
PC: Sheldon.
BP: Sheldon.
PC: Sheldon Kennedy. When my mom and dad came back from the war, Sheldon and his brother, Wayne, were running their place. Their dad died when they were fairly young (I think my mom was 16), so Sheldon wouldn’t have been – I don’t think even that old, he was a little younger. But they took the place after the war, and they were in a little bit of a financial bind, and Wayne was sick, so they sold 200 acres of it to my dad and mom. And then they bought another place down below, north of where we were.
BP: Oh, so that’s how your mom and dad got into it?
PC: Um-hmm, yep.
BP: Bought that little bit from Sheldon and Wayne?
PC: Yep, yep; Sheldon and Wayne. And so it’s kind of fitting now, it’s back almost you know; it’s being run as one place again. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 5
BP: Yeah?
PC: With some more attached to it.
BP: But they were – both those ranches were –
PC: Yeah, they’re contiguous.
BP: Contiguous?
PC: Yeah, they are.
[06:11]
BP: So is all your operation on deeded property, or you got some –
PC: No, we have some—
BP: BLM or Forest land?
PC: We have some BLM range.
BP: Do you?
PC: Yeah. And its checkerboard private with the cattle company that runs out here on the Cumberland. It’s 52% -- either 52% private and 48 federal, or vice versa (those are the percentages). And the government checkerboards everything, and that way they control everything. And we own some out in there (we’re part of that cattle company), so we own not a huge part, but some of it.
BP: Do you own any of the private land in there?
PC: Yeah, yeah.
BP: You own some private land, and you own –
PC: Yeah, the company owns it, and we own stock in the company.
BP: In the company?
PC: That’s how they work it.
BP: Okay.
PC: There are a few guys that homesteaded out there, and they took exchange of use with theirs, but I believe they still hold the title to those (some of them do). I think Wally Shulthess still probably has his, but most the rest of them just sold them to the company, and then took stock in the company. So that’s how that works. And my dad had my grandpa’s permit up to Woodruff, and it had some BLM, and also some Forest. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 6
BP: That’s the other way?
PC: That’s the other way, that’s south of us. But he sold it when – oh, I don’t know – I was probably 23-4 years old when he sold that. So we don’t have anything other than – the rest of it we have – we’ve been running about 25, maybe 30 years on a big piece of private ground south of Evanston, that’s been really good range for us, but we just lease it (just sub it from a guy). There’s three of us up there now, it’s been a good deal for us – but you never know when you lease.
BP: If you’re going to have it next year?
PC: [Laughing] If you’ll have it for ten years, or ten minutes.
BP: Can you do a long-term lease, or as long as you can? Or do you just go year to year with them?
PC: Well, they’re pretty much year to year.
BP: Yeah?
PC: We would like to go longer, but they don’t want to. But it’s worked that way for a long time.
BP: Yeah?
PC: It’s been through three owners.
BP: Oh, has it?
[08:33]
PC: Yeah, it’s currently owned by a couple of ladies from China.
BP: China? Hmm.
PC: Yeah. I’m not sure that they don’t live on mainland China now; at one point they lived in Hong Kong, on the island. But I think since the Chinese took over the island, I was told this fall that they’re in mainland China now.
BP: Hmm. So do you see a lot of that? I mean, do you know enough about the people that own the land around here to see what foreign investors are here?
PC: No, but that’s a huge piece of ground.
BP: Yeah?
PC: Most of what’s around here is broken up to a point where it wouldn’t hold any interest; but that’s right [it’s] about 100 square miles. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 7
BP: And you guys lease that whole thing?
PC: Yeah. It runs – between us, and the other two guys – we run about 1,200 head of cows on it – 1,250, something like that, in the summer (from the first part of June until mid-October).
BP: Do you – on private leases – do you determine when it’s the right time to put them on, and taken them off, right?
PC: Yeah. Well, one of the guys that runs with us, he pretty well makes that call.
BP: Yeah.
PC: He’s got cattle, and he manages the range for his right to run on it. So yeah, he watches it; they live just a few miles below it, so he’s in charge of when we go on, and stuff.
BP: Do you have water and everything on a piece that big?
PC: Oh, yeah; it’s a nice piece of ground. It’s you know, a lot of the country is subbed – it’s all hillside and stuff; I guess you’d call it the lower part of the Uintas; it’s not very steep.
[10:35]
BP: Um-hmm.
PC: But not too far south of it, it gets steep (up towards Humpy). There’s some mountains and stuff, but it’s not tough, tough country, until you get south of where we run. But it’s a nice piece of ground.
BP: Yeah, it sounds like it. So your operation is getting pretty good sized?
PC: Yeah, it’s about all a guy and a half can get around.
BP: Are you the guy and a half?
PC: Well, my brother’s the half, and I’m the –
BP: Your brother’s the half?
PC: [Laughing] And I’m the guy, yeah. Because, like I said, he works full time off the place.
BP: Have you got family, yourself?
PC: Yeah, I’ve got a wife and three boys, and a girl.
BP: What’s your wife’s name?
PC: Pam. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 8
BP: Pam – and is she a local gal, here?
PC: No, she came from Morgan.
BP: Morgan. Did she do any ranching over there?
PC: Her dad had a small place.
BP: Yeah?
PC: They were big into horse racing.
BP: Uh-huh?
PC: Her brother jockeyed out in California until he was 54-55 years old, and then he retired. He was AQHA [American Quarter Horse Association] Jockey of the Year two or three times.
BP: Really? [What’s his name?]
PC: [John Creager.] He’s upper echelon for a jockey. And now he’s managing [for] the guy that owns Los Alamitos (the track).
BP: Yeah?
PC: He’s managing his horse ranch for him, up in Atascadero. So that’s her roots: [horse racing].
BP: Yeah; do you have horses up here you do that with?
PC: No.
BP: No?
PC: Most of ours aren’t that fast.
BP: [Laughs]
PC: Pam would love to get a race horse, but we never have.
BP: Do you use – I imagine you have to use your horses?
PC: Oh, yeah; yeah, we don’t do a lot of – we’re not four-wheeler cowboys anymore.
[12:38]
BP: Yeah. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 9
PC: My dad got crippled up, and he bought a four-wheeler – and that’s as close as we’ve been. When his wore out, we just kind of quit that.
BP: Yeah.
PC: I decided I could either have a well-trained four-wheeler, or a pretty good horse.
[Laughter]
BP: Well the horse is probably a better deal, particularly in the country you’ve got to work in.
PC: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of four-wheelers; they talk about how bad a horse can hurt you, but four-wheelers are every bit as bad, or worse.
BP: Yep; so most of where you’re located, you don’t have to do a lot of trucking your animals around, do you?
PC: Yeah, we do.
BP: Do you?
PC: Yeah; we’re 60 miles from our summer range. Except for this side (the east side) – we turn them out the gate. But yeah, I was looking at the bill for trucking too and from, just the other night; I think it was right around $9,000.
BP: Do you have rigs big enough that you can do that? Or do you have to hire somebody?
PC: No, we have to hire; we’ve got a friend that hauls them for us. I think we brought 14 loads out this fall, and probably took 12 up (you can get a few more [on] in the spring, because the calves are smaller).
BP: Yeah.
PC: But it was around 9,000 – just over $9,000 for trucking.
BP: So if you could get all your land –
PC: Oh, yeah; that’s huge.
BP: You’d be –
PC: You might see the day that the only guys that will own a cow are the ones that are contiguous to their range [if] trucking gets too high.
BP: Yeah, well you know, in Cache Valley that’s pretty much put a damper on a lot of those guys that used to run sheep (particularly), and then they take them to the west desert in the winter.
PC: Yeah. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 10
BP: And you know, they can’t afford to truck them that far, if you can find a rig.
PC: Well one year when we had a drought here, and hay was an ungodly price we checked out going back and putting our cattle on some corn fields (back in Nebraska). And the trucking was as much as the feed. I mean – you truck them out there and get a big storm, and have to buy them hay – you’re worse off. And you knew you were in them two trips, no matter whether you stayed a week –
BP: [Laughing]
PC: Or six months. So yeah – I mean that’s what happened there; we didn’t go, and that was why.
BP: Yeah, so you had to? Could you raise most of your feed?
PC: Yeah, but that’s part of the reason we started doing a little custom haying – most guys like to do it for half.
BP: Yeah?
PC: So we pick up feed that way. Not all of them, some people like to pay you for it, because they need the hay. But most guys just say, “Oh, you put it up for half,” so that gets us some extra hay. If we didn’t do that, we’d have to buy hay.
BP: Some years that’s not a bad prospect; right now hay is probably pretty high, isn’t it?
PC: Yeah; yeah, they’re telling me $150 a ton for grass hay. Cattle are high, but you know, that knocks a pretty good hole in it!
BP: It sure does.
PC: [Laughs] That takes the profit out of it –
BP: Yeah.
PC: When you’ve got to buy hay for that much.
BP: Yeah; if you could get hay for $40 a ton, and have cattle high that would be –
PC: I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see that.
BP: [Laughing] I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen.
PC: I think god doesn’t think cowboys are emotionally or intellectually mature enough to handle being rich.
BP: No? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 11
PC: Because when prices are good he sends in a horrendous spring, and half the damn calves die; and so you just – because they’re high, you make enough to keep going. And when the price is low he sends you nice weather, and it keeps you going again.
[16:44]
BP: Did you have a tough calving spring this year?
PC: Yeah. Yeah, we did; it was rough.
BP: Wet, mud?
PC: Wet, and cold. It actually snowed hard twice on Memorial weekend (two different days on Memorial weekend).
BP: Oh, man.
PC: I’m talking wet, heavy snow – not just a duster going through.
BP: I can’t remember if we got that down in Logan; of course we had the same kind of a spring, but I don’t remember that we actually got snow in the valley. It snowed in the mountains right up to the middle of June!
PC: Yeah. Friday night it rained and turned to snow; hell, it snowed so hard. And then again, I believe Saturday night or Sunday night it snowed again [laughs].
BP: Right in the middle of –
PC: Right in the middle of Memorial weekend. And you know, we didn’t ship our cows to the range until – I think the last one left on the tenth of June. You were asking earlier who determines when it was time to go – there just was no grass, it hadn’t melted, and it was cold. So we sat on – normally we’ll start moving cattle the 25th of May – so that was an easy two weeks later.
BP: So that’s another two weeks’ worth of hay.
PC: Yeah. And then the bad thing is your cattle are so congregated on the feed row – it’s like sending kids to the daycare: one of them gets a snotty nose, they’ve all got it? Same deal with calves on a feed row. If you can get them spread out, you’ve got a chance to keep them alive; if they’re eating on top of each other it just goes – whatever happens, happens. So yeah – it was a hard spring.
BP: It was a strange year.
PC: Yeah, it was.
[18:40] Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 12
BP: The whole year was kind of strange. So you’ve got – in your haying operation, do you got a big swather, and a baler?
PC: Well, we use a pull-behind. If I ever go broke it won’t be because of fancy machinery.
BP: Yeah.
PC: I was talking to Nick Wamsley from over in the valley today, because we’re looking at trying to get a smaller tractor to feed with (we feed with a big 160-horse John Deere, and we don’t need that much tractor). He asked me how many hours were on the one we were wanting to trade, and I said, “Well in 800 more hours it will be brand new.”
[Laughing]
He laughed, he said, “I guess that means it’s got 9,100 and something hours on it, huh?”
[Laughing]
I said, “Yeah, you’re pretty good, Nick.”
BP: The hour gauge is still on it?
PC: [Laughing] Yeah. Oh yeah, it’s still turning.
[Laughter]
BP: Well, that’s a big expense.
PC: Yeah, it is.
BP: If you’re going to be buying those tractors. I mean, it’s pretty hard – you’ve got to sell a lot of calves to pay for a tractor, or swather, or anything else.
PC: Personally, there’s guys that buy those big, self-propelled [swathers]; but I can’t make it pencil out for me. You can buy a header for 25,000, and one of those is 80 or 100; so you’re parking three-quarters of what you’re paying for, nine or 10 months, 11 months out of the year – depending on how big of an operation you’ve got haying. I mean some guys hay for six weeks here. If you park something that long, I don’t know how you get your money out of them. But some guys like them. But we’ve always just had a pull-behind, and you can drop it and use your tractor.
BP: That makes more sense to me.
PC: Well, it does to me; but they’ve probably got an angle on it I’m not seeing.
BP: [Laughing]
[20:45] Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 13
PC: And then we’ve got a three by three baler. So it’s not the biggest one (by far), but it works pretty good for us.
BP: It puts a lot of hay into a bale?
PC: Oh yeah.
BP: 1,000 pounds?
PC: Oh, alfalfa will go 8[00] – you know, 800-850, something like that; the grass, usually around 700. I made a little feeder here a couple years ago that turned out pretty nice. I used – you were asking about the bread loaves – I used one of those wagons and took the feeder part off of it, and hooked a hydraulic motor up to the conveyor so it turned slow. And then I just hit it with a little bar at the end (a little wedge), and it crimps the bale just a little bit, and crawls along and tips over.
BP: So it’s to feed them in the winter?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Sounds like you ought to get that –
PC: Patented?
BP: Patented.
PC: Nick came over and looked at it, and he said, “You know, when I come over here,” he said, “I wasn’t expecting much. But,” he said, “this is pretty slick.”
I said, “Well, the biggest trouble is, Nick, anybody that can weld, and run a torch can build their own – they don’t need [laughing] – they don’t need to buy it through me!”
BP: Well, you’d have to have one of those –
PC: Because it’s really simple.
BP: You’d have to have one of those things though.
PC: Yeah.
BP: To get it to –
PC: Yeah, you’d have to have one of the wagons. And I’ve seen other feeders that are made to fit on that wagon.
BP: Yeah?
PC: One of the guys here has got one. But this one, I think, is every bit as good, and it was a lot cheaper, because I built it [laughs]. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 14
BP: Yeah.
PC: I work cheap!
BP: [Laughs] Yeah. You can afford to pay yourself.
PC: [Laughing] Yeah, I haven’t made $90 an hour in my life!
[Laughter]
I made 50 once, throwing three-wire bales around (when I was younger).
BP: Fifty dollars and hour?
PC: Yeah, I went to work for –
BP: You weren’t throwing three-wire bales very far.
[22:44]
PC: I was unloading hay trucks for a guy; they had a big drought in here, and we bought some hay. And he asked my dad, “Do you know anybody who wants to make a little money unloading bales?”
“Yeah, my kid will.” And it turned into about a three or four year job for me in the fall.
BP: Really?
PC: But he would pay me $30 a load, and you could unload five loads in a day, if you hit it hard, set of doubles. If you had a [good] guy with you, it goes pretty good.
BP: Do they have like boards on the end of those?
PC: Huh?
BP: Did they have the boards, and the wires that went over boards?
PC: No.
BP: No, they just had –
PC: They were just –
BP: Wire tied?
PC: Yeah, they were just wire-tied. They’d weigh 100-120 pounds; they were big bales.
BP: You don’t see them anymore, do you? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 15
PC: No, nobody wants to work that hard.
BP: I think that’s part of it.
PC: They were heavy. We got in a load of third-crop out in Wells one day, and the hay was so soft you couldn’t keep a bale hook in them. I could pick it up about that far –
BP: Did it have wires?
PC: And the guy that was helping me – he could pick up one end and drag them – that’s all he could do [laughs]. He couldn’t even daylight them.
BP: That’s a poor baling job, wouldn’t it?
PC: Well, there’s just no stem to them, you know, that third crop is just straight leaves. You stick a bale hook in them, and out they would come.
BP: Well you earned your money.
PC: Yeah, we did.
BP: Getting that load undone.
PC: I guess it wasn’t $90 an hour, but it seemed like a lot of money in those days – $150 a day. That was back around ’78-9.
BP: You were doing okay.
PC: Somewhere in there.
BP: Luckily you were young.
PC: Yeah.
BP: I don’t know if your back could do it now, would it?
PC: It wouldn’t; I went to college broke one year, and I decided I was never going to do that again.
[24:50]
BP: [Laughing]
PC: So every year after that I would get a job in the fall, and then I would go to school winter and spring. The last year I finally thought, “I can’t drag this out anymore.” So I took out a loan for the last quarter and got done.
BP: What did you do – what kind of a – what were your classes? Animal science or something like that? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 16
PC: I took a little of that, not much; mainly economics – I [have] an Ag Business degree –
BP: Oh, do you?
PC: Is what [I have].
BP: When did you graduate up there?
PC: Eighty.
BP: Eighty? When did you start up there?
PC: Seventy-four [laughs].
BP: The six year program.
PC: I actually only went to school ten quarters –
BP: Yeah.
PC: To graduate; so I got out early, but it took me awhile to get there, because I was paying for it. I had a scholarship when I started, and when I come back I didn’t get that picked up again. After that it was all my money.
BP: But you made it through school taking a loan out for one quarter?
PC: Yeah, yeah.
BP: Nineteen eighty –
PC: Yep, I borrowed $1500.
BP: You did alright.
PC: Yeah. I remember one year I was broke a buddy and I – we’d take turns buying a six-pack of beer, and we’d go up the canyon and shoot squirrels. That was all we could afford to do for fun [laughing].
BP: Doesn’t sound like a bad afternoon [laughs].
PC: No, it’s a good afternoon until you try to pick up a girl with that strategy, and that didn’t get you very far.
BP: [Laughing] Where did you and your wife meet up there?
PC: No.
BP: No? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 17
PC: Uh-uh. No, I met her after I got out of school.
BP: So you didn’t take her on a squirrel shooting date?
PC: No, uh-uh; uh-uh.
BP: [Laughing]
[26:50]
PC: Here’s kind of a funny story about my wife and I. My dad showed me a picture that a guy (here in town) had taken years, and years ago – he was maybe 14 (my dad was). And he’s telling me who these guys in the picture are, and they’re all kids: one of them was his brother, and another one was a brother to the photographer. And then there was this other little guy just sitting there, and I could tell he was younger then those other ones in the picture. And I said, “Now who’s that guy?”
And he said, “Oh, he’s just a little guy that – his name was Bud Creager, he lived just up the street from us for a couple of years.”
Well Pam and I went out, and the next week her dad brings this picture out and starts to show me, and I thought, “I’ve seen that picture!” And it was Bud, the little guy that dad said, “Oh, he just moved in,” it was my wife’s dad.
BP: So he actually lived up here?
PC: He lived in Woodruff for a couple of years, and he was in that photograph of dad’s –
BP: Did your wife know that?
PC: Not until –
BP: Not until then?
PC: No, uh-uh. I mean, she knew he lived there, you know, but she didn’t know about the picture until Bud showed me.
BP: I know a lot of people tried their hand at living out here.
PC: Yeah.
BP: And didn’t make it very many years.
PC: No.
BP: Or even weeks.
PC: They lived in Bridger Valley too, for awhile. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 18
BP: Wow, that’s –
PC: And then they came to Woodruff, and then I think Johnny moved them back down there in Morgan. I don’t know whether he had family there or not.
BP: Yeah.
PC: Yep, Bud wouldn’t have been more than maybe nine or ten. And there he was, big as life in that picture.
[Laughing]
BP: That’s funny.
PC: I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, you know if Pam and I hadn’t ended up getting married; but it was quite a coincidence.
[28:50]
BP: Do you think your kids are going to – you said how many boys you have?
PC: Three.
BP: Do they – are any interested in the ranch?
PC: Well, it’s too little; right now dad needs it. But yeah, I’ve got two that really like cowboying. One of them is here working for a guy (ranching for a guy), and the other one that likes it is in Honduras right now. But I told him, I said, “Son, you need to come back and be a doctor or a lawyer, and buy your dad a ranch, and I’ll run it for you until you’re sick of the city.”
BP: [Laughing]
PC: So we’ve got that all worked out.
BP: Do you?
PC: [Laughs] And the other boy – he’s a mechanic; he likes that stuff, he doesn’t care much for cows and stuff. And my daughter – I don’t know what you – she likes to ride, but she’s not nuts for it, so I don’t know if she’ll want anything to do with it or not.
BP: Now you said you did a little rodeo?
PC: Yeah. Yeah, I rode bareback horses until I was 24.
BP: Until you got smart enough?
PC: Well, I had one flip on me out to the circuit finals in Elko one year, and broke my neck pretty bad. I’ve been 50 since then (been 50 years old since that horse landed). Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 19
BP: I’ll bet.
PC: My boy broke his neck on a bronc horse, and he just walked right away; but there wasn’t [any] walking away for me.
BP: What do you mean he walked away? He didn’t know it was broken?
PC: He didn’t know it was broken.
BP: When did he figure out it was?
PC: Oh, his neck – that was on a Saturday night, and he went with his buddies out in the hills out here, out on that checkerboard range. And he called his mother and said, “My neck is still hurting, maybe you better get me an appointment with the chiropractor.”
So she calls her buddy the chiropractor on Monday morning, and Clint goes in the afternoon, and she gets a call from Dee saying, “This boy’s got a broken neck, you get over here.” He put him in a collar and sent him to the hospital right now. He didn’t get to manipulating him [laughs].
So we’re sitting in the room – there’s five of us in there, and two of us had broken their neck; I said, “What’s the odds of that?” (I asked the nurse that.) But I was –
BP: Probably, if they’re cowboys –
PC: Maybe better than you’d thought.
BP: Yeah, uh-huh.
PC: Yeah. But I laid there in the arena for – oh, I don’t know – 30 minutes because they got the ambulance stuck. And I could move –
[End Tape 1: side A– 31:23]
[Beginning Tape 1: side B: 00:01]
BP: So we were talking about your rodeo days – were you doing that while you were going to college?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Or was it before or after?
PC: Both.
BP: Both?
PC: I rode a little bit in high school, and then I went on a mission. And when I come back I started again, and I finally got it figured out enough to fill my permit in the RCA, and Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 20
that’s where I was when I broke my neck, was at the circuit finals down there. It was quite a [wreck], they got a picture just as he lands, and it hung in Cross Western Wear for 30 years, until they went broke. It still hangs down there in the Spring Creek Horse Palace, where I did it.
But I was halfway back to Elko, and couldn’t get a toe to move. My brother was with me in the ambulance, and I said, you know, “Watch my foot,” nothing. I kept trying and trying, and trying; finally I got my big toe to move, and I thought, “I’ll be alright.”
I get in there, and I’m numb – I mean, I can’t feel a thing (no pain, nothing). And the nurse looks at me, and she said, “We got to take your shirt off, can you stand to have us unbutton it?” And I said, “Yeah, I can’t feel anything, go ahead.”
She undid one snap, and I looked at her, and I said, “You better get the scissors out,” because I came out of it then [laughing]. Oh, man.
BP: And then there wasn’t a part of you that didn’t –
PC: Then it was a long night; then it was an awful long night.
BP: Huh.
PC: They put me on a life flight out of there about four o’clock in the morning; I got up to Salt Lake, I don’t know, about six.
BP: So what’s the process of a broken neck? What do they do?
PC: Well, they put me in traction for ten days and they couldn’t get it to move. The doctor came in, he said, “I’m not sure,” he said, “We’re wondering if this is an old break. Could you have ever broken your neck before?”
And I said, “Well, we were wrestling (my brother and I) once, and I got a pretty good stinger. But,” I said, “I don’t think I broke my neck.”
“Well, we’re going to go in.” Anyway, it was a fresh break, but they fused it and put some wire in it. I was there for 20 days. But you know, it doesn’t bother me, other than I can’t turn my head. I’m the easiest guy to sneak up on in Rich County.
BP: [Laughs]
[02:37]
PC: But I lost a lot of reflexes; it did quite a bit of nerve damage. We had a stray crawl in the next spring (which would have been from November to May, about six months later). My dad went and got her in (she crawled in [with] the bulls), and he got on a horse and went and got her, and she was on the fight. She came in the corral – and that’s pretty good incentive, when one of them is chasing you. [Laughs] I ran over [to] the fence and tried to jump; I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled [with] my hands and jumped. And I didn’t Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 21
make it to the [top of the] bottom two by six (that’s how much athletic ability I had left) [laughing].
BP: What did the stray do?
PC: Well, she just blew on by.
BP: Yeah.
PC: She was bluffing, but I didn’t dare take a chance.
[Laughing]
But my boy, he still rides broncs (he’s 27), and he’s got hurt a bunch. He broke his neck, broke his back, broke his leg. He went to the high school nationals –
BP: Is he still running?
PC: Yeah, he’s still riding.
BP: Or still riding?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Well that stuff sort of gets in your blood.
PC: Oh, yeah.
BP: Like an addiction, doesn’t it?
PC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s a high, just can’t get anywhere else. Crawl off a bareback horse you’d rode right, and man, you’re just walking on air all the way back to the chutes.
BP: There’s not many times you get to crawl off of one.
PC: [Laughing] Not many; not many. I tried to give the pick-up men something to do, but not all the time [laughs].
BP: Yeah, that’s quite a deal.
[04:29]
PC: My youngest kid, he wanted to but he loved football and I kept talking him out of it, and talking him out of it –
BP: Which is more dangerous?
PC: Well, I told him, I said, “You know, Cooper, I was out of school when I broke my neck.” I said, “If I’d have done that when I was in high school, my sports would have been Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 22
over.” So I kind of talked him out of it; he rode some colts, and stuff and he got on a few with his brother down in Ogden. But I don’t know whether he’ll ride when he gets back from Honduras or not; maybe if he doesn’t get married.
BP: Is he on a mission down there or something?
PC: Yeah.
BP: So 27 – that’s getting towards the end of a –
PC: Yeah, some of those guys: bronc riders, saddle bronc riders will last longer than that; some of them make it [to] 35. Billy Etbauer – hell, he was pushing 50 before he quit, riding NFR [National Finals Rodeo] horses; but he’s a rarity. But it’s not as hard on you as barebacks.
[Laughs] About a year ago, about this time of year, I went down and had carpel tunnel surgery on my left hand, and the guy said, “I don’t know what you’ve done to this elbow,” he said, “But it’s not right.”
I said, “Well, that was my riding hand.” [Laughs] I said, “It took some jerkings.”
He said, “Well it’s a good thing you finally come in here,” he said, “You’d have lost the use of your fingers.”
BP: Is that right?
PC: They just pinched nerves in there, I guess, I don’t know. Because you know, I don’t run – like I said (we talked earlier) – I don’t run a computer.
BP: Yeah, there’s only so much that the body can take.
PC: [Laughing] Yeah. But it’s pretty good now. But bronc riding is easier on your body, so some of them last a little longer. But yeah – I don’t know how much longer he’ll ride. He ended up Reserve Champion in the association he was in, for the year – so he’s still riding pretty good.
[06:30]
But they’re running out of cowboys, they really are. Most of the ones that want to rodeo want to rope, you know. We went to Evanston Cowboy Days (which is a really good rodeo), and I think they had eight cowboys entered the bareback riding for Labor Day, and only four of them came, the other four turned out.
BP: Really?
PC: They’re just running out of them; too many kids are raised in the city. I wrote a poem called “The Dying Breed” and that’s about what we are [laughs].
BP: So how did you get interested in this cowboy poetry? Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 23
PC: Oh, I wrote one 30 years ago and never thought much about it. And I was home one night when Cooper was little (he was about twelve years old), and my wife was gone. I got bored, and they’d just found the first mad cow in the United States. And I sat down and wrote a poem called “Ballad of the Mad Cow” and they’ve just been coming out ever since [laughs].
BP: Good for you.
PC: I’ve had a lot of fun with it.
BP: Do you ever go around to any of the gatherings?
PC: Oh, I’ve never done anything at them. I do some, you know – last Friday they had a little deal here (Friday and Saturday), and I do some poems for that, and I’ve got some CDs out.
BP: Do you?
PC: I wrote a Christmas poem for my daughter when she was six, and I put that in a book, and I’ve been peddling that around and stuff. It’s been kind of fun.
BP: Have you ever been to the one around the one in Elko?
PC: No; I’ve been going to go, but Cooper was always playing ball that time of year (that’s in January).
BP: Randy – she goes out to it every year, she’s a folklorist, you know.
PC: Oh, yeah.
BP: So she knows all those –
PC: I sent a CD down. I don’t tell everybody this, but my wife and I went to Baxter Black (over in Preston) a year ago, when he came to the Valley Implement. And I gave him a CD after it was over – bought a book, and a CD of his, and I said, “I want to be able to tell my boys I gave you a CD.” [Laughs] So he took it and thanked me.
And – oh, I don’t know – it was a month later he called me. He said, “I liked that stuff on there.” He said would you go to Elko, would you send some stuff down there?” Anyway, I did, but they said they didn’t need me, but it was still fun. That’s as close as I’ve come to going. They said they had 200 poets send stuff in.
[09:19]
BP: I’ve never been out to it.
PC: It’s a huge deal. I’ve been to Heber City.
BP: It’s quite a party, I guess, they say. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 24
PC: Oh, I’m sure. I’ve been to Heber City a couple of times, but I’ve never been out to Elko. You know, it would have been fun to have them say, “Yeah, come on out.” But it was still fun to have Baxter like it – he’s about as good as it gets.
BP: Bottom line though, it’s a way to get what you’re feeling out.
PC: Yeah, my wife tells me it’s therapy [laughs].
BP: I suspect it is.
PC: Yeah, there’s been a time or two I’ve been so frustrated – rather than throw something out the window, I’ve written about it. But it’s fun; most of them are funny, but not all of them.
BP: Kind of like life.
PC: Yeah. I wrote one for a friend of mine – he got killed in a car wreck; he got paralyzed, and then he was so paralyzed that he would have never got off the respiration machine. Anyway, I wrote one and gave it to his wife. And I read it to her, and she’s sitting there, tears start running down her cheeks, and dripping on her boots. If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget that.
BP: That’s good that you touched somebody. Was that a guy locally, here?
PC: He was a vet up in Evanston, Wyoming. He was an organ donor, and that’s what I kind of wrote the story about, what that would mean to somebody else.
BP: Yeah.
PC: He was a good guy. In fact, I think they wrecked two years ago today, and he lived for two or three days on a machine, and said, “No, I can’t do this.” And they unplugged him – he was gone in minutes.
BP: Yeah; did he – he wasn’t in any shape to make that decision, was he?
PC: Yeah.
BP: Oh, really?
[11:32]
PC: I mean he couldn’t talk – all he could do was blink his eyes. That was the sign; I wasn’t there, but that’s what I was told.
BP: Yeah; well, what else do you want to tell me about your ranching stuff?
PC: Oh, it’s a good way of life. I’m on the school board up here, and a friend of mine (he ranches) – I don’t know if I would call him a “cowboy” but I would call him a rancher. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 25
And he asked me one time, he said, “What are these kids going to do that don’t want to go to college, that just want to ranch?”
And I said, “If they don’t have to have a new truck, and a big, fancy house every time they turn around,” I said, “they’ll go to work, and they’ll be happier than most of the guys with lots of money. But,” I said, “If they have got to have a new truck every other year, and their wife wants the biggest house in town – they’ve got a problem.”
So you have to be willing to not have – you can see my truck – the paint job on my truck.
BP: Yeah, I saw that as I pulled up.
PC: [Laughs]
BP: I thought, “There’s a man after my own.”
[Laughing]
PC: If you can’t stand to drive a truck that looks like that, you better find a different job.
BP: Yep.
PC: But you know, not whining – they’re making it hard on things, because they don’t value what technical guys do (like mechanics, and carpenters, and farmers); that’s not where the push is now – we’ve all got to go to college. Well there is a certain niche of our population that have no business going to college, because that’s not where their talents lie.
BP: Let me back up for a minute: what pushed you to college then?
[13:35]
PC: Well, my folks just wanted me to have a degree. They said, “You’ve got to have something you can fall back on.” That’s why I went to college. And you know, all the information was good – I used some of it, business stuff.
BP: What are you telling your own kids?
PC: Well I tried to send them to college.
BP: Yeah?
PC: The first two of them wanted nothing to do with it. The oldest kid (the one that’s cowboying), he liked school – he could’ve made it through college okay. The middle one – he’s a mechanically-oriented kid; and he could have maybe went to diesel mechanics, or something like that, and done himself some good. But he’s picked it up, and that’s what he’s doing now. The youngest boy – he’s pretty smart, he likes that kind of stuff. He had his associate degree when he graduated from high school up here. So he’s on his Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 26
way. But you know you can’t de-value what those people do; they have as much to do with running our society as all the pencil-pushers do.
BP: Yeah.
PC: And we’re losing that.
BP: The crafts –
PC: The crafts – they’ve been de-valued, and that’s wrong.
BP: Yeah.
PC: I told the governor up here – I got invited to a deal, he came by one day; I find myself in situations with the school board sometimes, that I wouldn’t be normally, and he came and stopped at the school, and so we got invited. And I asked him a question about that; I said, “I went to a construction site, and everybody working [there] was ESL.” And he thought I was worried about open borders –
BP: Um-hmm?
PC: I said, “I don’t care about that.” I said, “What bothers me is we’re losing those skills, crafts.” I said, “Who’s going to build my daughter’s house?”
BP: Well, you know there’s a reason why everybody at that construction site was ESL is because they’re the only ones who know how to do the work.
PC: Exactly. And to them, the compensation they’re getting is so much better than they would be getting at home, that it’s still a good wage.
BP: Sure.
[15:50]
PC: But you know Americans don’t want to work that hard for that kind of money. But we’re losing those kinds of skills and crafts.
BP: Yeah, and you know – well, nothing is – if you ever got somebody to keep it moving –
PC: When “No Child Left Behind” was passed [a former superintendent] (he wasn’t superintendent then, but he was when I first came on the board), he made this comment to me. He said, “Not everyone – that’s not their strong point, to go to college (everybody in society).” He said, “There are kids that you hand them a blue-collar job, and they’ll do a tremendous job at it, they’ll make a good living.” He said, “What are they thinking?”
BP: So you mentioned “No Child Left Behind” is intended to prepare people for –
PC: College. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 27
BP: For college.
PC: Yeah.
BP: Well, that’s they way high school is.
PC: Yeah, and I just think they’re missing –
BP: And we’re getting kind of away here, but I don’t care. My son – he made it through high school because we ended up pulling him out of high school and putting in him one of these alternative high schools.
PC: Um-hmm?
BP: But he did make it through that.
PC: Um-hmm.
BP: Because everything the school was geared towards was talk you know, and that was to push people towards –
PC: College.
BP: Towards college, which he never had intention of going.
PC: Yeah. And they’re losing a pretty valuable part of our society by doing that.
BP: I know. He’s a mechanical kind of kid.
PC: Well that’s when my middle –
BP: I wish I had a great, big ranch that I could give him –
PC: Yeah.
BP: He’d be the happiest kid in the world.
[17:54]
PC: That’s the way my middle kid is; he struggled in school, but you hand him a wrench, and you know – you look like you’re probably about my age – they used to test IQs when we were kids.
BP: 40!
PC: Yeah!
[Laughing] Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 28
But I remember on the IQ test I was absolutely terrible on spatial relations; well he’s just a whiz at it, you know. He can turn something – I’ve struggled with that all my life. I mean, I build a lot of stuff (welding, and stuff), so I’ve had to get better at [it]. But I still once in awhile build a part, and it’s exactly backwards from what it needed to be.
BP: [Laughing]
PC: Well, there’s a good section of our population that that’s where their strengths lie, so don’t tell them that’s not of any value.
BP: I don’t even know if they do those things anymore?
PC: I don’t think they do, I think they figured it was “typing” kids.
BP: You’d have to –
PC: Oh, yeah; but they were afraid it was, typing kids, putting them in slots that they’d stay in all their life. And so they quit. But I don’t remember what my IQ was, but I remember I bombed the spacial relations [laughs].
BP: Trying to get all those little boxes –
PC: Yeah.
BP: Different shapes – yeah, I never did do very well with that stuff either.
PC: So that’s, you know, that’s a concern I have. That, and the environmentalists, they don’t –
BP: Do they give you a hard time up here, on your ranch?
PC: Oh, not particularly here; but they’re after the BLM all the time to get the cattle off. I guess they’d sooner have that land produce absolutely nothing, as long as it didn’t, if it just sat there fallow, why it couldn’t get any better than that: we’ll buy our food from China.
BP: What do you suspect drives that agenda? I mean, it’s an agenda that they have – it’s not like they’re going out and they have noticed this over-grazing thing; they just – it’s every allotment.
PC: I know. I honestly don’t know, unless it’s just money. I don’t know why people would have those kinds of thoughts: that it’s better to leave something fallow, than it is to produce. Pretty quick, we’ll buy everything we get from foreign countries.
I wrote a poem called “The North American Free Trade Agreement Cowboy Way.” And that’s what it is – it takes common stuff like a pocket knife, and a pair of Wranglers, and Budweiser beer – I mean, none of that stuff is made in America anymore. And then the last line is he is going riding the next morning on ground that’s not owned by Americans Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 29
anymore. But it will be okay, because that’s the North American Free Trade Agreement cowboy way.
[20:47]
BP: Um-hmm.
PC: And that’s what’s happening to us. If I hear one more law maker talk about cutting the deficit – hell with cutting the deficit – pay the damn debt back. It doesn’t do any good to just go broke, more slowly – that does no good. That’s all they’re after, “Let’s not go broke quite as fast.”
BP: Um-hmm.
PC: But anyway, that’s not really ranching, except how it relates to the economic part of it.
BP: Yeah, doesn’t it.
PC: Yeah.
BP: Well, Pete – it’s been a good conversation.
PC: Yeah, I enjoyed it.
BP: Always nice to meet somebody that, you know –
PC: I hope I can –
BP: Stayed on the –
PC: I hope I can keep it together long enough – I’d like to see my kids have a chance too. But I sure hope I –
BP: It’s getting harder and harder to –
PC: Do.
BP: To afford.
PC: Oh, yeah. One of the major problems now is when you try to buy a piece of ground, you’re not competing against other ranchers, you’re competing against doctors, and lawyers that just want to buy some ground. And the value is way past what agriculture can pay.
BP: Yeah. I mean, you can’t even find an appraiser that will come in and appraise a piece of ground for its agricultural value hardly anymore.
PC: Yeah. That’s why I told my boy, “Go be a doctor or a lawyer for a few years,” and then we’d ranch together [laughs]. Ranch Family Oral History Project: Pete Cornia Page 30
BP: That’s not a bad plan.
Alright, Pete; I’m going to shut this off.
[End Side Tape 1: side B: 22:32]